the Places panel in caja uses close to 40% more space, but IDK yet how much of that is this bug or if some of if was deliberate.
It's ... both, I think?
After "Computer", the additional spacing is caused by
.caja-side-pane scrolledwindow.frame treeview.view {
padding: 3px 0px 3px 0px;
}
in mate-applications.css
. Change that to 1 and you get 16.04's "tight" spacing again. Even 2 is probably more than enough for anyone.
What's interesting though is that "Computer" still has a huge blank area both above it; and beneath it before the home dir etc are listed. The "Network" section that follows it IS spaced correctly though, both above and below that section heading.
So it looks like there's something "special" about the first entry in the treeview, and the additional spacing on all the other rows is actually just a hack to match that.
I'm guessing that's because the treeview itself is buggy (possibly by GTK3 intent?) and that first line couldn't be fixed, so all the other lines had to be padded out instead. Is that what happened?
I don't seem to be able to drill down into the treeview itself with GTK Inspector, but that may well just be my lack of familiarity with it. There doesn't seem to be any property in there that controls this - at least, not one that I can find - but that seems almost impossibly unlikely.
As far as the spacing in the file panel goes, Menta has the tighter spacing of 16.04, so it looks like TraditionalGreen is at fault there, and it can be tightened up just by finding the right piece of CSS.
Menta also tightens up the Places view to match 16.04, but even then still has the same issue with that first line having excessive whitespace around it. I'm guessing (again) that it's because it's being treated as a column heading.
Does anyone happen to know of a way to fix this, to save me having to wade through GTK to try and find one?
Thanks.